Нельсон Демилль - The Best American Mystery Stories 2004

“What in the name of God do ye think you’re doing?” he asked, not daring to raise his head so it looked as though he were addressing the dead. I laid the front sight right middle below his beard.

“Halting you in the name of justice,” I replied. “You’ll hang for murder,” I assured him. “Now stand up and turn around.”

Still on his knees, the man barked a hoarse laugh, “You’ll have to shoot me.” He laughed. “Murder. What all do you think is going on around you, ye dumb son of a bitch.” He stood and turned and walked away. “Go on and shoot me, I ain’t got the time to waste on you fine-minded gentlemen.”

“Very well,” I murmured and squeezed on the curve of the trigger. The snap of a misfire came and quickly I cocked hack and pulled again. Misfire. His high yokel laugh taunted out of the darkness. I pulled my saber and rushed after his receding form. He whirled and I saw in his arms a bayoneted rifle and I drew up like a horse tethered.

“Easy now, my pretty,” he said as we began to circle each other delicately. “Don’t be messing where ye going to get hurt. I’ll kill ye dead I will,” he said. It was a scene backlit by the forest fire and our shadows danced dark in the dirt in a ghoulish duel. My opponent continued to circle but with one hand fumbled in his pockets. I prepared myself to come in a rush and thrust hut out of his grimy fingers came a percussion cap, which he stuck in beneath the pulled hack hammer as he pointed the rifle at me.

“Loaded and cocked, now,” he grinned, lupine. “Stick it in the dirt, son.” The muzzle drooped to show me the direction.

“How come you know it’s loaded?” I asked him. “Perhaps it isn’t.”

“Try it, son.” He still grinned. “Shoot you or run you through, don’t make no difference atall. Now.” He jerked the muzzle downwards.

I turned the sword blade down and stuck it in the ground.

“Good,” he said. “Now walk on in front of me. Get on hack to where ye come from.” I stepped forward and stumbled past him, each second an eternity waiting for the roar of the rifle which would announce a bullet ripping through my hack and out my stomach to kill me slow and steady. It did not come but I didn’t want to turn and see what he was doing. The woods loomed ahead dark and mysterious and still full of the rippling waves of gunfire and a trace of fear went through me when I thought that death awaited no matter which way I now turned. Certainly the wounded here knew these salient facts. One grasped the cuff of my trouser leg as I passed and said in a plaintive voice, “It don’t look had do it?” I never paused in my stride. I heard the man with the rifle begin to walk behind me and a few minutes later the wounded man asked him the same query. I turned and looked. The man knelt and cradled the wounded man’s head. With a canteen, he gave him a drink and wiped some of the grime away from his face. “It don’t look had do it?” the wounded man repeated.

“Hey. How you?” said my opponent, and he raised up one leg. From out of his hoot, he pulled a bowie knife and he stuck the knife into the man and he died. He was searching through the man’s moneybag when he heard my approach and stood, knife at the ready. I held up my hands when he slashed the air in front of him as duelists do.

“Easy, boy, don’t get no ideas,” he told me.

“Why?” I asked him. “All I want to know is why?”

The eyes went blank for a second but then he let loose the high yokel laugh. There were gaps in between his teeth, some all but rotted away. “Goddamn,” he snorted, “I tell you, you officers ain’t got the brains God gave a turkey.” He knell back to his counting and finding no gold coins he threw away the purse in disgust. He turned on the balls of his feet and pulled another man, dead this one, to him with a grunt. He began the search anew.

“But why?” I asked again.

“Lord God,” the man said, sighing. “To get rich, you fool! You know how much gold is out here just going to perdition and gone cause no one bothers to collect it? Least ten dollars worth, mayhap as much as fifteen.”

“No, but why are you killing them?” I asked. He had moved on to yet another one, Yankee this time, groaning with the crimson slaverous froth about the mouth that comes from being lung shot. He stabbed him and held it until the quaking ceased. He looked at me with eyes baleful and red rimmed from the smoke spread everywhere on the clearing floor.

“How long you figger this feller had?” he asked. “Ten? Twelve hours? Or how about them sonsofbitches over there with they arms done shot off? Four? Lessen the sawbones gets to them and leaves them crippled for they whole lives ahead. I’m just helping them get out of this here vale of tears and into the vale of glory. It’s Christian duty, pure and simple.”

I looked about me and saw the men with faces contorted from hurt and their low moans seemed to be felt more than heard and the world looked a sad and blasted place indeed, metal churned and blood soaked and there seemed no flaw to his reasoning even in my addled state. But yet, I persisted.

“Some would call it murder,” I said. “Courts, for instance.”

The man shrugged and went back to his labors like a prophet unbowed despite the years of perpetual misunderstanding. “Let them,” he said and then an explosion shook the ground from a battery firing blind into the dark and drowned out the rest of his words. When I could hear over my ringing ears, he was saying in an indifferent tone, “... them sonsofbitches will sit up there on high and run they mouths and tell you that what they doing is so high and mighty and if ye listened to they words you’d think God was on everybody’s side in this here war. All we’re doing is fighting for niggers and that means money and that means nigger money.” He shook his head. “The world’s come to a sorry pass when white men are killing white men over niggers.” He looked at me standing in front of him as he tried to roll a big Dutchman over. “Goddamn, you could give me a hand at least,” he said. I apologized and bent and helped him drag the man by the heels to where we could see his pockets in the light of the fire. I almost fainted from the exertion and sat down beside the dead.

The man continued to talk as he hefted a gold watch in his hand feeling the weight. “All a man can do,” he said, “is find pleasure in what he knows is good for him. They stole me from home, give me a rifle and said, go fight. I said. All right. Said, I’ll fight all you sons of bitches tooth and nail and get rich in the meantime.”

He continued to gather corpses, me his earnest helper all the while. Before long, there was a stack of dead almost knee high and the purses of them had been slit open and their contents gathered in a pile which grew as we threw in a watch or gold coins and the precious metal gleamed with a weird luminescence from the silver moon light and the burnished orange glow of the fire. Before long, we both gave pause and I collapsed from weakness and he sat down beside me grinning his odd grin out of the sweat-beaded fur of his beard. He took out a pipe and put in a small white ball, lit a match and breathed in a lungful. He offered me the pipe. “Get ye some,” he said kindly. I took the pipe to calm myself and breathed in and the colors of the laudanum came back to me and I felt near drunk.

“Yes indeed,” said the man, “I took to ship a good bit in my younger days and the monkeys over there in Cathay got me good and drunk with that there tobaccer. I got me a New Orleans Jew doctor over in Heth’s division who sells it to me for a half take on the gold. Times been where he run out and I had to go on over and be with the boys in blue and get the supply on up again. Them boys will swap ye anything long as ye got tobaccer. Especially them Irishmen, you never seen the likes of it. I stay around there and turn myself a nice profit and then conic on back over. Yes sir, I drifted from one side in this war clear on over to the other one and it didn’t make the slightest bit of difference in the world far as I was concerned.”